Emily in Paris star Ashley Park revealed her successful career was nearly cut short when she was diagnosed with blood cancer as a youngster which she mistook for growing pains

Emily in Paris star Ashley Park has revealed that she was diagnosed with blood cancer as a teenager and nearly mistook the symptoms for growing pains.

The 33 year old star, who is best known for playing Mindy Chen in the Netflix series, was suffering with an aggressive form of blood cancer, acute myeloid leukaemia.

This meant at the age of 15, she was covered in bruises and faced the heart-breaking loss of her hair due to treatment.

Now Ashley leads an incredibly successful lifestyle, but her future was hanging in the balance at the time of her diagnosis.

Speaking on My First Time podcast, she said: “It’s so crazy to be the woman I am now, it’s very full circle. 

It was right before Christmas that I was diagnosed. I danced and I did a lot of extra-curriculars and was late to all my classes because I couldn’t climb the stairs in time. I had bruises everywhere and I had lost so much weight. But everyone is changing when you are 15. I was like, ‘Great, my growth spurt, I’m losing all my baby fat’.”

Initially, Ashley said that she overlooked the symptoms and decided to focus her attention on drama at school. She continued: “I was doing High School Musical and I loved theatre so much. I was starting to get very sick and we put off going to the doctor for a while. I remember laughing about my bruises with friends. We finally went to the paediatrician after school and they took some blood and said, ‘You need to go to the ER right now’. I said, ‘I’m going to go to rehearsal first’. They said, ‘You should call your dad’. We went to the ER that night and I didn’t leave hospital for eight months.”

Ashley added: “At that time, my world stopped and everyone else got to keep going with their lives. At a young age, I was like, ‘I really can’t see past this. I don’t ever imagine a world where I’m not in this hospital bed alone’.” After recovering, Ashley was determined that her illness would not define her. She told K-Pod podcast: “I was the girl who had cancer, and I had spent my whole life trying not to be the Asian girl. I want to be the smart girl, the nice girl. I love being Asian, but I don’t like that it’s the first thing people are going to see. All of a sudden I was the sick girl, and I’m bald and look a certain way.”

While dealing with cancer treatment, Ashley was granted a wish by Make A Wish Foundation and she chose to see the sights of New York to watch her first Broadway show. And it was after seeing the live production, she decided that a life on stage and in front of the camera was for her.

At the age of 16, Ashley recalled: “Once I left hospital I decided, ‘I don’t want this to define me, and one day I will have long hair again and people will have no idea’. But it is something that has defined me, despite me not wanting it to. I had the adult form of leukaemia, which is more intense and spreads faster. But I see it as a blessing because, instead of a three-year treatment protocol, it was really vigorous. I never thought theatre was a career possibility but, because I survived cancer, my parents were like, ‘You can do whatever you want’. “

She added: “Millie was the show I did when I came out and I believe I was not supposed to return to school. It was insane. No wonder my parents were so worried. I was this bald girl and I wasn’t supposed to be walking and I’m doing Millie. The wigs I wore in that show are all from my own hair.”

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Source: USA Today